The old frozen hard drive trick
Every now and then I go through the motions of cleaning up the two hard drives on my main desktop computer. During one of these spells, I came across some old newsletters from the now-retired Fred Langa. They reminded me how much useful information Fred’s newsletters contained. One of the many items worth repeating has to do with a last-ditch way to try to get your data off a failing hard drive. More than once I have been asked how to copy precious files from a hard drive gone bad. (Naturally, no backup had been made.) Here’s some advice Fred gave in his Windows Secrets column to a reader who asked about a possible recovery method:
It’s not a wives’ tale, Ken. The “hard-drive-in-the-freezer” trick is a real and proven, albeit last-resort, recovery technique for some kinds of otherwise-fatal hard-drive problems. In fact, it’s part of a trio of unusual fixes that — believe it or not — can be summed up as “freeze it,” “hit it,” and “drop it”!
Clearly, these fixes run the risk of further damaging a drive. They truly are last-ditch efforts to be called upon only when you’ve already tried the normal drive fixes without success and have nothing left to lose. (We’ll come back to this in a moment.)
The freezing trick sometimes works because the mechanical contraction/expansion may help free up binding parts. Other times, the cold can help an aging, failing electrical component to remain within specs for at least a few minutes — perhaps enough time for you to recover your essential data from the drive.
Here’s how the freezing trick works:
Take the dying, otherwise-irreparable hard drive out of your computer, and place it a Ziploc bag (to help minimize condensation on the drives). Put the bagged drive in a freezer for several hours. Then, working fast, take the drive out, remove the bag, and reconnect the chilled drive to the PC. If the drive spins up and seems to be working, get your essential data off the drive as fast as you possibly can.
The best option for this is to selectively copy portions of the dying drive to a new drive. Start with the most essential folder trees (My Documents, for example), and then copy increasingly less important folders as the drive warms up. Odds are, the drive will again become erratic or fail. But, if you’re lucky, you’ll be able to squeeze one last brief use from it.
Any readers out there ever tried this freeze-the-disk trick?
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It would seem to me that it would be easy to put the afflicted hard drive in an external housing. Then after freezing, run the wires out to a notebook, while leaving the housing in the freezer.